


Your important years, your life

by gloss



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Family Feels, Finn's a complete human being, Gen, M/M, Overinvestment in Kes Dameron 2K16, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Roleplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7351435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Finn nods. "I don't know how these things should go."</i>
</p><p><i>Kes's laughter is sudden, loud, enough to rattle the dishes in the cabinet. "These things don't tend to <b>happen</b> in the first place." He claps Finn's shoulder and squeezes hard, adding, "Not unless Poe's involved, it seems."</i><br/>Inspired by <a href="https://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/4613.html?thread=11141893#cmt11141893">this kinkmeme prompt</a> (but then it went another way): "Finn/Poe, Kes walks in on them: Dad walks in on the sex. With incredibly awkward aftermath."</p><p>First short section (~125 words) is explicitly sexual; the rest is low-rated gen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your important years, your life

**Author's Note:**

> This can be a Finn-POV companion to [Against Disaster](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6904006), but it stands completely on its own, too.
> 
> So many thanks to Artifactrix for reading an earlier draft and not hating it, and for Finn-spiration.
> 
> Title from Husker Du, "[These Important Years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knjh4K_QqUQ)".

There they are, Han Solo -- bloodstripe breeches, clinging jersey and loose vest -- with his legs spread, hard cock springing up, and Princess Leia -- white dress, complicated hair, bright lipstick -- kneeling in front of him, sucking him all the way down, moaning for more.

"You like it, don't you, princess? Like my cock scraping down your throat?"

Leia leans back, jacking Han's dick, and says, "I love it. I love it. I want it."

"What? What do you want, sweetness?"

"Want to come on your cock, make you feel it, want --"

"C'mon up, then." He opens his arms, pulls Leia up and slips one hand under her dress. "Are you nice and wet for me?"

"What the everloving _fuck_ , I --" Kes drops the carton he came back here to fetch and stumbles backward, mouth open and working on air, then bumps into the wall, bounces off, and half-runs out of the barn.

"Fuck." Finn's grip on Poe tightens reflexively, almost crushingly.

"No."

"Yeah."

Poe buries his face against Finn's shoulder. He's straddling Finn's thigh, the white dress bunched up to his waist. Shivering now, skin crawling. All the sweat and arousal he'd felt a moment ago has transformed into shame and nausea and this slow, sick sensation he can't quite name beyond -- "...the _fuck_."

"I'll go talk to him," Finn says.

"Don't. Don't. Just -- we can be off planet, deep in the hyperlane, in an hour. Less if I don't do a full systems check." Poe scrambles off Finn's lap and paces in a tight circle, gesturing wildly, the skirt getting tangled around his legs. "Who needs a full systems check, anyway? Not me!"

"Man, don't be stupid."

"I've already been stupid! I'm wearing a fucking dress and getting off on my lifelong childhood heroes! Let's just go all the way and get the fuck out of here. Never look back. Yavin-4? Never heard of it!"

Finn pulls himself to his feet and looks around. "I should change first."

"For hyperspeed travel? No need." Poe clutches at his shirt hem and looks at him imploringly. "Come _on_ , let's _go_."

"I'm going to change," Finn says slowly, taking his time in order to convince himself, "and go talk to your dad, apologize, something, and then, maybe, I don't know. Throw myself off the nearest cliff. Are there cliffs here? Your planet needs cliffs."

"Cut out the middleman!" Poe says, grabbing at Finn with both hands now. "Let's jump _together_."

Finn lifts Poe's hands away and nods, like he's coming to an agreement with himself. "I'll be back. You try to calm down."

Poe chokes on laughter at the mere prospect.

First Finn washes up, then finds his regular trousers and an old, stretched-out shirt of Poe's. It's dark, and has a closed collar, so as the opposite of anything remotely suggestive of Solo's look, it's perfect.

"No one ever comes back here," Poe had said, dragging Finn to the nest, "it's perfect, bet no one's been here since the last time --" He stopped then, which is when Finn realized this was his old hook-up spot. Poe's old hangout is dusty, overheated thanks to the reclaimed and hammered-out metal that forms its walls, little more than a tangled nest of old livestock textiles and cast-off blankets in the farthest corner at the back. It's a dreamy space after the orderly rows of equipment, parts, and old pallets that Kes has stacked in the rest of the barn.

When Finn steps outside, the clarity of the air and chill edge to the breeze are sharp, almost fortifying.

He walks barefoot up the side lane from the old barn. He pauses now at the edge of the main yard. He's half-expecting Kes to be standing at the door, arms crossed, a glower on his face. Maybe a blaster in his hand?

He's never actually seen Kes with an expression remotely like a glower, nothing worse or crankier than a slight _oh, crap, ate too much again_ look, so it's hard to picture.

Then again, Finn doesn't know how much of this works anyway. It's all a little hard to picture. He's been pretty lucky so far to make as few mistakes as he's had and to meet people like Poe who couldn't care less about the mistakes he does make.

But having your -- what _is_ Kes in relation to him, anyway? That's an entirely other question, one to tackle at an entirely other time. Having Poe's dad walk in on one of your more experimental sex scenes -- and, no, he's never going to follow Poe's lead and call it a _sexperiment_ \-- is more than a mistake. He has gathered that much just from keeping his ears and eyes open. He's not sure what it's called, but it's not good.

"This stuff's kind of private, buddy," Poe told him early on. "Not shameful! Not gross. But it's something friends keep between them."

"Yeah, I know," Finn had replied, yanking his trousers back on, irritated all over again by that particularly _nice_ tone everyone got when telling him what he should already know. If only he'd been lucky! If only he were normal. "I was a stormtrooper, not stuck in a black hole."

"Shit." Poe tilted his head against his shoulder, squinting, looking away. Later, Finn would come to recognize this as one of his more obvious thinking faces. When he looked back, his expression was a lot softer -- no squint, no twisted-up mouth, just open gaze and parted lips -- "I'm sorry. That was fucked-up."

Finn sat back down again. "It's okay. I'm -- I'm not an idiot."

"I know," Poe said. "Believe me, I know that --"

"So act like it," Finn said quickly before the rush of heat to his face could carry him away. Then it receded and he bit his lip. "I mean. You do, most of the time. But then you go and --"

"-- act like an asshole, yeah." 

"Not an asshole," Finn said. "Thoughtless, maybe."

"More thoughtful-er, I can do that." Poe looked at his hand, resting on the bunk between them, and turned it palm up, spreading his fingers, then curling them closed. It looked like one of the exercises the med-droids made Finn do in physio to test his fine motor control and flexibility.

He pressed his palm against Poe's and stretched his fingers. "Thanks."

*

Kes isn't glowering when Finn finds him in the kitchen. He's tasting the stock simmering at the back of the range. When he sees Finn standing there, he nudges a bag of squash with his foot toward Finn, then takes down the cutting board from its hook on the wall.

Finn grabs a paring knife and gets to work on the squash. It's just like being back on base, except, thankfully, this food won't get boiled to tastelessness.

While Finn peels and chops, Kes checks on the meat roasting in the oven, then starts mixing the bread dough. He's quiet, but he usually is in the kitchen, focused and quick-moving.

Finn came in here, he thought, to apologize, but he shouldn't. He doesn't have anything to be sorry _for_. 

Which isn't the same thing as having nothing to say.

"Sir --" Finn starts.

Straightening up, wincing, then quickly hiding that (he took a blaster bolt to the hip on Endor, but the chronic pain is something, Poe told Finn early on, that isn't discussed), Kes shakes his head. "Let's not and say we did, huh, buddy?"

Finn sweeps the peels into his cupped hand and drops them into the compost before turning to face Kes. "I just wanted to see if you were all right."

Kes grins, then ducks his head and looks away, frowning. Finn has to smile back when he realizes, right, of course, _that's_ where Poe gets the expression from. He rubs his hand over his mouth, trying to look serious again.

"I'm good," Kes says from the far corner, where he's set the dough to rise. His shoulders -- broader than Poe's, maybe Finn's, too -- are sloped a little. The close-cropped hair on the nape of his neck is silvered, bright against his dark skin. 

"Okay," Finn says, lifting the next squash out of the bag. "I'm glad."

"Appreciate you checking in."

Finn nods at the squash. "I don't know how these things should go."

Kes's laughter is sudden, loud, enough to rattle the dishes in the cabinet. "These things don't tend to _happen_ in the first place." He claps Finn's shoulder and squeezes hard. Bending back to check the oven, he adds, "Not unless Poe's involved, it seems."

"It's not his fault," Finn starts to say but Kes is shaking his head as he straightens up.

"No blame," Kes says. "Simply observing, years of experience. The boy gets himself into the strangest circumstances. Only reliable thing about him, really." Finn's smiling again. He can't help it. Anyway, Kes is, too. "-- until you came along, that is."

Finn almost drops the knife at that. He doesn't -- his coordination and discipline are too good for that -- but he feels like he _should_. Mark the moment, arrest time, remember this, with a scar, some stitches, even just the clatter of metal on ceramic tile.

"That's -- yeah, all right." Finn hates it when words desert him. It's all too reminiscent of being in the armor, gagged, silent, _thoughtless_. He shakes his head, like that will help, and exhales. The cubes of squash glisten a little, purple and pink edged with orange, like clouds at sunrise. "Thank you."

Kes brushes past him, carrying the roast over to the counter, and on his way back, slides his hand almost consolingly along Finn's back, his neck and shoulders.

"Ought to thank _you_ ," Kes says after a bit, "but you'd knock it back to me, so on, so forth, we'd argue, it'd be messy, and I like you too much to go through that."

Finn can breathe again, just like that, a smile loosening his face as he nods. "Why bother? Sounds like a hassle."

Kes points the bread tray at him. "Exactly. Knew you'd get it."

Finn dumps the rest of the peels before filling a small pot with broth to coddle the squash. When it's set on a front burner, the heat turned up, he washes his hands. He's moving, acting, deliberately. He needs to take his time, watch himself, while his thoughts gather and clarify.

"Sometimes it's like I only think clearly in a dogfight," Poe said once, early on. Middle of the night, two sets of bad dreams shook them awake, but they were too sleepy, too freaked, to fuck. So talking it was. "Rest of the time, it's all a little fuzzy."

"Like you're most alive then?" Finn asked. "Might as well be sleepwalking the rest of the time."

"Yeah." Poe's hair was dark against the bunk, blurred into the shadows, like his head was open at the top, endless, bottomless.

"Yeah." Finn knew exactly what that was like. He didn't like it, but he _knew_ it. He wanted to feel as clearly, fully, in the predawn light, watching Poe sleep, or armwrestling over drinks with Rey, as he did with a blaster in his hand or in a gunner's seat. He ought to be able to, but it took effort, a lot of effort.

This wasn't the sort of thing you could ask other people about. That he'd understood what Poe meant, that Poe could even say it to him in the first place, was one of those things that on the surface made no sense but nevertheless drew them that much closer.

When they're finished in the kitchen, the bread cooling, the roast carved, the squash still firm but no longer tooth-crackingly hard, Kes hands him a small bottle of thistle-wine and holds the door to the yard open.

They sit in the shade under the red birch, looking out over the Lobins' late harvest. Kes lights a skinny cigar. The smoke is peppery and strong, like Kes himself, as it wreaths around their heads.

"No offense, and I say this with love, sincerely, as a compliment," Kes says when the cigar is nearly finished and he's lighting the next one off its end, "but I'd've pegged you much more as a Skywalker."

"Thanks," Finn says. He finishes the sweet wine and rolls the bottle between his palms. 

"Poe, on the other hand --"

"He really likes the general," Finn says, then winces at how inane that sounds. And also _strange_ , considering the context. "I mean --"

"-- he's always been something of a princess," Kes says and it takes a moment, but Finn realizes he's smiling now. "Don't think I needed quite that confirmation, though."

"I'm really sorry," Finn says. "I don't know what else to say. I don't even know what I'm apologizing for."

Snorting, Kes wipes his arm across his forehead. "Nothing to apologize for."

"Poe was pretty worked up, upset, though, so --"

"He's going to pretend nothing happened," Kes says. "Any minute now, he's going to blow through here with some bantha-shit about how he needs to get back, right the hell now, really sorry, Dad, you know how it is, and then he'll go silent for a month or so until he thinks the coast is clear."

"I don't think --"

Kes jabs the burning end of his cigar at Finn. "You love him, but I _know_ him."

"But --"

"You've been a hell of a good influence on him, that's for sure, but some things run too deep."

Finn pulls his legs up to his chest and loops his arms around them, planting his chin on one knee. In _and_ out of the cockpit, Poe's a master of the dodge, of evasion, of hitting hard then flickering out of sight. Finn used to think it was something all normal people could do, but he was wrong. Few are remotely as good at it as Poe. He's absolutely there when you need him, but he's no good at all staying still when he needs you.

He can't evaluate whether he's been any kind of influence on Poe, since he has no way of knowing what Poe was like before. He has to take Kes's word for it; he's happy to.

The branches above them rustle and creak suddenly, but there's no wind to speak of. A few immature nuts cascade to the ground, then some leaves drift down. _Poe_ drops next, landing messily on his knees and one hand, hair in his eyes.

"I will _not_ be talking about anything that may or may not have happened in the old barn," Poe announces, brushing off his hands, crawling over to sit against Finn's knees. "I want to make that perfectly clear."

Finn looks up into the complicated layers and filigrees of branch and leaf, the darkening sky poking between the patterns, filling up negative space, then back down. He works a few twigs from Poe's hair and off his shirt.

"I think you have a _hell_ of a lot to explain, as a matter of fact," Kes tells him, his voice gone profoundly deep.

"Nope," Poe says, plucking the cigar from Kes's fingers and inhaling. He tips his head back, catching Finn's eye and winking, then blows a series of smoke rings. They lift and tremble against the foliage before pulling apart and vanishing.

"Sending your man to clean up what's _surely_ your mess, first of all," Kes continues, recapturing the cigar. He scowls at it before taking a puff. "Getting my favorite and none-too-cheap smokes all chewed up and soaked with your gross spit, second of all."

"Quiet, old dude --" Poe digs in his jacket pocket and tosses a flat pack of cigars at his father.

"Wasted more than enough breath on those shitty general rations," Kes says and throws the pack back. "Thanks, but I'd rather smoke Trandoshan droppings." He puffs his cigar contemplatively a few times.

Finn breathes, taking in the smoke, finger-combing Poe's hair, listening to the low buzz of the Lobins' harvester droid. Poe's scalp is hot against his fingertips.

"This is a height thing, isn't it?" Kes says eventually. "You always did identify with Organa. Fellow shrimps. Scrawny bossy types stick together."

Despite himself, wondering if this is disloyal, Finn laughs a little. _Traitor_ , he hears, at the back of his mind, and stops.

"Oh, yeah, what I always wanted to be was an enormous galumphing jackass," Poe says. He beats his fists a few times against his chest. "Marines forever! Big and brawny, me Poe, you mine. Bully, bully."

Laughing, wheezing a little on the smoke caught in his mouth, Kes slaps the ground, making the twigs and nuts jump, then slumps back a little against the trunk. His shoulders are still lifting, his grin is still huge, but there's no sound coming out.

"That's my boy," he says to Finn. "What he lacks in size, he makes up for in mouthiness. Always did."

Finn gets a sudden, _unwelcome_ flash of Poe's mouthiness -- red lips, hot tongue, tight working throat -- and shivers a little. He thinks Poe shifts against him, feeling that, but he swallows and says, as evenly as he can, "He really doesn't ever shut up, it's true."

Until he does go silent, but that's another story.

"I'd say he got it from his mama, but it's always been a mystery, actually." Kes drains the last of the wine in his bottle.

Poe is shifting back, pushing up between Finn's legs, pulling one of Finn's arms over his chest.

"His smarts, that's all her, though," Kes continues.

"Definitely not you, that much we know," Poe says.

There's a shape missing. His thoughts are in order, but something's missing. Finn senses it, an absence more than anything else, as he listens to them.

At first he thinks it must be Shara. He's watched holo footage of her, both in person and in battle, listened carefully to what Poe and, eventually, Kes have shared about her, but she's about as close to him as his own mother. A concept and a name, nothing more.

That's it, that's the gap in his thoughts. He listens to them, laughing when it's funny (and they're very funny), but he is elsewhere. There's that slight softening to his thinking, slippage away from being fully present. Unfamiliarity and lack of urgency conspire to nudge him away.

There's no one in his life right now that he's known for much longer than a standard year and a half. No one he's known longer than Poe, but that's not very long at all. Whatever history is, whatever it means, even simply a duration of time spent with other people -- what Poe and Kes have -- Finn doesn't understand.

He doesn't _miss_ it, and he appreciates its presence, but he doesn't understand it.

Poe works their fingers together and squeezes Finn's hand.

"So when're you going to clean out the old barn, anyway?" Poe asks. "It's like a fucking mausoleum back there."

"Or a museum," Finn suggests. 

Cigar caught in his teeth, Kes rubs the back of his neck. He tips his head back against the trunk and exhales up into the branches.

"That's it," he says, eyes tracking something, "that's what we'll call it. The Yavin-4 Regional Museum and Monument to Master Poe Dameron, His Youthful Escapades, Stupid-ass Shenanigans, and Absurdly Poor Decision-Making. I'm real proud of it, as a matter of fact. Each and every ale bottle, spice foil, puddle of bong water, every damn cumrag and half-empty slick tube, too."

"Dad, _gross_ ," Poe says. 

"Should hang a portrait gallery of conquests, friends, lovers, frenemies, nemeses..."

"I don't have a nemesis," Poe says. When he sucks in a breath, Finn's arm dips with his chest. "Not in this system, anyway."

"Your own common sense," Kes says smugly. "Worst nemesis this side of a Sith." When Poe groans, Kes adds, "please. You walked right into that one."

"Yeah, well, at least I don't _walk in_ on consenting adults exploring their healthy --"

"Hey!" Finn puts in as loudly as he can while still sounding halfway normal. "We should clean the barn out." 

"Son, no --" Kes starts as Poe twists around, frowning. 

"Fuck that, we're on vacation here."

It's a good idea, but it's obvious Finn's suggestion is wrong, maybe for several different reasons. He rolls his shoulders back and smoothes down the fabric of Poe's jersey. "Just a thought."

"Much appreciated," Kes tells him. "But unnecessary."

"Keep it the way it is, clean it out, trash the place," Poe says. "I don't care."

"He _does_ care," Kes says. He slaps Poe's leg, shakes him by the knee. "Loved that place. Sometimes wouldn't come out of there for days."

"So I could be alone!" 

Finn watches their argument -- pointless, teasing, _warm_ \-- tick back and forth between them. It's more about the rhythm of the thing than the content. He understands that now.

"Alone? Rare you didn't have one, sometimes more, friends in there, getting up to all sorts of interesting things."

"I'm a social guy, Dad. Sorry you're some kind of freakish loner."

"And by 'friends', of course, I mean --"

"Kes Dameron," Poe says, sitting up, frowning extravagantly, "don't you fucking --"

They're staring at each other. Kes tilts in, his shoulders matching the horizon. He draws himself up, and that really is a glower he's wearing now.

Finn clears his throat, and again, but neither of them glances at him.

"I know you slept with other people," he says. That fact ought to go without saying, but it seems to be one of those _private things_ that can spark shame and secrecy. "If that's what you're doing. Arguing about." He narrows his eyes. "You _are_ arguing?"

Poe still doesn't look away, but he slides his palm up and down Finn's leg. Eventually, he says, "We're good."

"Yeah," Kes says, slowly, drawing out the sound, his smile spreading. "We are."

"Glad to hear it," Finn says and hops to his feet. "I'm going to have dinner."

*

"You know how kids are," an exhausted-looking minder had said to him back in the Yavin spaceport when three little ones ran over his feet, shrieking.

Finn had shrugged and nodded. It makes people -- broadly defined -- uncomfortable if he says, no, actually, he doesn't. Even more than the deliberate niceness people can put on for him, he hates that strained frown they get when he says something true.

He doesn't know, however. He knows other things, a lot of other things that don't make sense away from the Order, things that are a lot harder to communicate. He used to be shorter, and the weapons they gave him were lighter, and his armor was smaller. They were all smaller, his whole squad, and then they grew, trained more, learned more complicated blasters and maneuvers. The armor got heavier, their sparring sticks sharper.

History was a smooth, regular line forward. A long march in formation for hours and years.

*

When Poe was nine, Kes tried to have the talk with him. Shara had never made too big a deal out of keeping him protected or innocent, so it wasn't as if the kid didn't know a lot. All the vocabulary, hygiene and self-respect, he was set on that and had been for a while.

Still, there were some things a father needed to impart, things about what was coming, things the boy needed to look out for and remember.

He was wiggly, though, even more jittery in the year since Shara's passing than he used to be, and he'd always been a handful. (Wait til he gets a little older, everyone'd said, year after year, he'll calm right down. Kes was still waiting.) He kept jumping to his feet, practicing handstands and backflips, while Kes tried to remember what the edu-holos had advised him to say.

"Your body, son, it's --"

"It's mine, something to be proud of and take care of," Poe said, righting himself, blowing impatiently at the hair in his eyes. "No one's allowed to touch me if I don't want to. Vice versa, too."

"Right, yes," Kes said slowly. He laced his fingers together, stretched out his arms, and nodded, wishing for a drink or a smoke. "There's definitely that."

"Pretty soon I'm going to get tall as you and my voice'll get deep and I'll grow hair in my pits and on my penis and --"

"Well, no, not _on_ the penis, but --"

" _Dad_." Poe bounced up and down on tiptoe now, his hands describing some intricate trendy dance move that Kes had no hope of identifying. "They cover all this at school. Without freaking out! You don't have to embarrass yourself."

He was so quick, this kid, it made Kes worry all the more sometimes. 

"I just want you to think about..." He had to pause to remember the right words, so Poe took the opportunity to jump up and down, touching elbows to opposite knees. "Privacy. Trust. Keeping things special for you and whoever you might be with, if that's something --"

"Ew, Dad, _ew_ ," Poe said, stopping short, hands on his hips, face wrenched up in a grimace. "Gross. That's just not cool."

"Okay, keep that for later. You can always come to me," Kes said, "if you've got questions or there's something you need to talk about."

Poe made a show of rolling his eyes, then bent backward to kick up into a handstand. "Duh," he said, toes pointing up to the ceiling. His singlet slipped down into his armpits, exposing his skinny back with the rocky spine and sharp, flexing shoulderblades. "Who else? You're my best friend."

"All right, then." Standing, Kes grabbed one of Poe's ankles and shook him lightly.

"Hey!"

He bent over until Poe met his eyes. "Never forget that, okay, buddy?"

With his free foot, Poe kicked him squarely in the chest. "Like you'd ever let me."

"I'm a monster, it's true."

"The worst!" Poe shouted after him.

Kes had no fucking clue what he was doing most of the time. He figured if he kept things simple, he couldn't mess the kid up _too badly_ and let Shara down. Still, no matter how many holos he watched and terribly awkward conversations he had with his own father and Shara's pop, there was always going to be much, much more that he didn't know.

*

After dinner, Finn climbs out of Poe's bedroom window onto the flat roof of Kes's house. The tiles are still warm from daylight, but the night is cool and dark. He sits against the chimney, legs out in front of him, looking up at the sky, eating the last piece of bread he'd tucked into his pocket.

He picks out the spaces between the stars, the dark stretches and faintly illuminated patches.

Before the Finalizer, he'd never spent much time looking up. The helmets didn't allow for that movement; curiosity was never part of the discipline.

"Planning a trip?" Poe asks when he finds Finn up here. His voice is low and rough. His hands smell like Kes's kitchen soap, scented with the same thistles he uses in his wine. "I can recommend a pilot or two."

Finn closes his eyes and kisses him. He tries to remember the first time they did this, to summon up what Poe felt like then, but it was all so fast and shot through with anxiety and exhilaration that there's little more than _need_ and _slick lips, sharp stubble_ in his memory.

"I'm good right here," Finn tells him. With his lips, he traces the sharp rise of Poe's jaw back to his ear. 

"I'm interrupting, aren't I?"

"Nope."

"Barging right into your thinking time. Thoughts. Contemplation," Poe murmurs, "meditation. Finn-trospection."

Finn laughs a little, mouth moving against Poe's neck, into the hollow behind his ear. "That's it. Noted philosopher 2187."

"He's got a lot to think about," Poe says, his arm snaking around Finn's shoulders. His hand curves around Finn's neck and squeezes. "A lot to share."

"Yeah, sure." Finn rolls his cheek against Poe's shoulder, looking back up into the sky. These aren't the same stars Shara Bey looked at, not even the same ones teenaged Poe partied under or Kes smoked beneath last night. The light prickles out in the same positions and makes the same patterns but it's every bit as new as the breath Finn just took, the sigh Poe just made, the most recent throb of a heart and crackle of a nerve. Systems and structures persevere but the experience, one's passage through them, is new each time. History tumbles into the now and keeps on spilling through.

Poe rests his head against the crown of Finn's skull, following the line of his sight.


End file.
